Dieter Roth, Reclusive Artist And Tireless Provocateur, 68

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

Published: June 10, 1998

Dieter Roth, a prolific, notoriously irascible, reclusive and eccentric German-born artist-provocateur who built a formidable reputation in Europe but remained something of a mystery in America, in part because he permitted his work to be exhibited here even more rarely than there, died on Saturday in Basel, Switzerland, where he had a home. He was 68.

He had heart problems, Carol Eckman, his New York dealer, said.

Mr. Roth was a sculptor, performer, book designer, poet, graphic artist, publisher and musician, sort of. Born Karl-Dietrich Roth in Germany in 1930, the son of a sugar beet farmer, he and a brother were sent for safekeeping in 1943 to Switzerland, a country that has always seemed to attract and cultivate people of nomadic and unusual temperament like him. He settled at a hostel for refugees in Zurich, where he stayed for four years and studied Greek, Latin and French at the local secondary school.

He began to exhibit in 1958. With fellow artists Hermann Nitsch and Gunter Brus, he did improvisatory concerts of cacophonous music. He staged a concert of howling dogs. Once he collaborated with Richard Hamilton, the English artist, on an exhibition for dogs (the pictures, of sausages and other images he thought would be of special interest to them, were hung at dog-eye level).

In 1975, he founded the Zeitschrift fur Alles, a journal that published anything submitted to it. In Los Angeles, he conceived an installation of 40 suitcases filled with different types of cheese. He often made sculptures out of fugitive materials like baked dough, chocolate, mayonnaise and rabbit droppings (fortunately, not all at the same time). Their natural deterioration, which he equated with his own death, became an integral part of his art.

All of this situated Mr. Roth within a post-war European scene that included Joseph Beuys, Yves Klein, Lucio Fontana and others who experimented with unorthodox techniques and who generally tried to blur the boundaries between performance and sculpture, theater and visual art, high culture and low.

He was perhaps best known as a maker of multifarious artist-books, hundreds of them. (One was as small as the eraser on a pencil; another, ''Literaturwurst,'' consisted of various periodicals chopped up, mixed with lard and spices and stuffed into a sausage casing.)

He was famously reclusive and difficult, notwithstanding his friendships with artists. It was through, Daniel Spoerri, for instance, that he met various members of the irreverent movement called Fluxus. Mr. Roth's link to Fluxus involved, among other things, his interest in music and sound, in ephemeral materials and in an anarchic kind of pranksterish humor.

But the dark undertone and furious, obsessive energy of his work ultimately separated him from many of the more lighthearted Fluxus artists. Perhaps despite himself, he was a fluent draftsman and expert printmaker, and his drawings and prints contained his wild energy within peculiarly virtuosic forms. Compared to the innumerable self-described artists of the last several decades who faked their way through his sort of work, Mr. Roth was the genuine item.

By nature he was tireless to the point of neurosis, and, among other things, this led him to experiment with numerous untested materials and techniques. ''When I was young I wanted to become a real artist,'' Mr. Roth once reflected. ''Then I started doing something I felt wasn't real art, and it was through this that I became a well-known artist.''

For his only American retrospective, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 1984, he agreed to attend the opening because much of what was on view belonged to a friend. But otherwise he was prickly about exhibitions. For his last show in New York, at the Nolan/ Eckman Gallery earlier this year, he declined to cooperate. Throughout his life he refused to play the role of the eager artist responding to a gallery or museum. It was, to him, a matter of pride and independence.

In later years he moved between Basel and Iceland, where he lived in a remote house on a lake and also in Reykjavik. He is survived by two sons, Karl and Bjorn, and a daughter, Vera, and nine grandchildren.

Asked how he would like to be remembered after his death, Mr. Roth said, ''Here lies the carcass of a man who didn't know who he was and where he was heading.''

Photo: The artist Dieter Roth standing in front of one of his works in 1986. (Nolan/Eckman Gallery)